Month: January 2011

On the 28th of January, I noticed that nearly all web traffic had come to a complete stop on my site (including bots!) this lead me to investigate what was going on, had I neglected a setting when switching of to the new router? No! it turns out that DynDNS removed wild card support for their free accounts so as all of my urls were prefixed with www. all these urls were now invalid thus reporting error 404 🙁

From what I can ascertain, it looks like the changes to the DynDNS terms of service changed sometime around June last year (2010) however, I don’t recall getting notice about such a move as this has a direct impact on my account as I was (up until 2 days ago) using wild card support which then allowed the use of www. So now all my urls need to loose the www. or they will not be found, rather frustrating considering that internal links work fine for me, but jump onto the other side of the router and it all goes pare shaped! Luckily, the SSL cert that I have covers both sub domains to the 3rd & 4th level or that would no be an invalid cert to be able to use on my site (€30 wasted) and I=as I still have two years left on that cert I was livered at first but then calmed down when I remembered that it covered both!

Now for me to regain the wild card support I am forced to upgrade my account, something that I’m simply not prepared to do given that this site is only really for my benefit and not really for others. Also the $15 USD can be better spent locally with my ISP I feel so I’ll be making some changes in the future in regards to my current domain name. I’m sure that there is a perfectly good reason why DynDNS decided to take this stance, but for me it’s a real PITA due to the ripple effect it’s had (I wonder how many other users have had similar issues) So DynDNS, you are on limited time! as soon as I can sort out a new domain then it’s goodbye from me!

Like this:

Below is an image of the current Tier2 APRS-IS network, at a glance you can see how it’s been broken into regions

asia.aprs2.net for Asia

aunz.aprs2.net for Oceania

euro.aprs2.net for Europe and Africa

noam.aprs2.net for North America

soam.aprs2.net for South America

As the end user, you can simply choose to connect directly to any T2 server, but should that server suffer from downtime then you will be without service until that server is restored. An alternate way to do things is to use a rotate DNS, that way should one server not be available the next in list is used. This assists in load balancing instead of just one single server being used. Australia & New Zealand do have a secondary rotate DNS of rotate.aprs.net.au this serves the same purpose as the aunz.aprs2.net so you can use either.

Like this:

Well it’s day three of twenty eleven, no blog post until now, suffering from a head cold and not feeling the best! my left ear is completely blocked and its rather disorientating 🙁

So enough whining…

As I posted in the comments to my last blog post I have been approved as a T2 Server and have now completed the setup, so that’s all running and taking APRS-IS connections as well as still serving as the local I-Gate.

I’ve scraped the plan of making a mirror of WikiLeaks, as there is a chance that it maybe in breach of the SFOA for me to go ahead with that 🙁